Allison Dickey manages student engagement at Risepoint, and when she talks about the company, she talks about growth before anything else. The culture, she says, is one of “always striving to be a better you than you were yesterday.” “It sounds cliché,” she adds on the company’s careers page, “but I really believe we have the opportunity to strengthen our skills, knowledge, and community if we dedicate the time to do so. When we share our ideas, and feedback and show we have the appetite for positive change, it reminds me of how grateful I am to be here!”
In 2026, the people she works with said much the same thing, anonymously and in volume. Comparably has named Risepoint a Best Place to Work in four categories this year: Best Career Growth, Best Leadership Teams, Best Sales Teams, and Best Product & Design Teams. The awards are based entirely on anonymous employee feedback collected over a 12-month period from workers at tens of thousands of organizations. There is no application process and no fee. Companies cannot enter; they can only be rated. Comparably, now part of ZoomInfo, has accumulated tens of millions of ratings across tens of thousands of companies, and its annual awards series has become a standard reference for workplace culture and compensation.
An Award for Advancement
The career growth honor goes to companies where employees give strong marks for advancement opportunity, learning, and professional development. A company can raise salaries in a quarter and repaint its job postings overnight, but career paths take years to prove out, and the people rating them are the ones living them.
Advancement also looks different at a distributed company, and Risepoint operates in a remote-first structure. There are no corner offices to inherit and fewer chances to be noticed in a hallway. What replaces visibility is structure: defined development paths, leadership training, and evaluation that rests on the quality of the work.
The benefits structure reinforces the point: employees who study in Risepoint-supported degree programs can have their tuition reimbursed, which means some of the staff supporting online students are online students themselves.
Confidence in the People in Charge
The Best Leadership Teams award registers a different kind of judgment: whether employees believe in the executive team and the direction it has chosen. Fernando Bleichmar, Risepoint CEO since 2022, has himself been recognized on Comparably’s Best CEOs list in past cycles, and he framed the new honors as employee verdicts rather than corporate ones.
“These awards are especially meaningful because they come directly from employee feedback,” Bleichmar said. “This recognition reflects the dedication of our team and the strength of the culture we continue to build together.”
The Numbers Behind the Awards
The Risepoint profile on Comparably shows a culture rating of 4.6 out of 5 and an overall grade of A, built from ratings submitted by over 590 employee participants, and carries the platform’s “Choice Employer” designation. Risepoint employs more than 1,400 people, so the scores rest on a broad sample of the workforce.
Risepoint works with more than 100 colleges and universities, all not-for-profit and most of them regional institutions, supporting online degree programs in fields tied to workforce demand: education, healthcare, business, and technology. Most students in those programs are working adults, and the company describes its mission as making education “more accessible, modern, and impactful for everyone.”
The remaining two awards, Best Sales Teams and Best Product & Design Teams, are rated by employees inside those departments. Taken with the company-wide honors, they suggest the career growth result is not confined to one corner of the organization.
